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Validation and Comparison of Instrumented Mouthguards for Measuring Head Kinematics and Assessing Brain Deformation in Football Impacts

  • Concussion Biomechanics in Football
  • Published:
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A Correction to this article was published on 02 February 2021

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Abstract

Because of the rigid coupling between the upper dentition and the skull, instrumented mouthguards have been shown to be a viable way of measuring head impact kinematics for assisting in understanding the underlying biomechanics of concussions. This has led various companies and institutions to further develop instrumented mouthguards. However, their use as a research tool for understanding concussive impacts makes quantification of their accuracy critical, especially given the conflicting results from various recent studies. Here we present a study that uses a pneumatic impactor to deliver impacts characteristic to football to a Hybrid III headform, in order to validate and compare five of the most commonly used instrumented mouthguards. We found that all tested mouthguards gave accurate measurements for the peak angular acceleration, the peak angular velocity, brain injury criteria values (mean average errors < 13, 8, 13%, respectively), and the mouthguards with long enough sampling time windows are suitable for a convolutional neural network-based brain model to calculate the brain strain (mean average errors < 9%). Finally, we found that the accuracy of the measurement varies with the impact locations yet is not sensitive to the impact velocity for the most part.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Pac-12 Conference’s Student-Athlete Health and Well-Being Initiative, the National Institutes of Health (R24NS098518), Taube Stanford Children’s Concussion Initiative, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (N00014-16-1-2949). The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of funding agencies. It should be noted that the MiG mouthguard and intellectual property associated with it is owned by Stanford University. We would like to thank Dr. Michael Fanton, Dr. Hossein Vahid Alizadeh, and Dr. Sarah McGough for the insightful discussions on the development of the experimental protocol and data analysis. We also want to thank Prevent Biometrics and SWA companies for providing the mouthguards and answering any necessary questions.

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Author notes

  1. Yuzhe Liu, August G. Domel and Seyed Abdolmajid Yousefsani have equally contributed to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Yuzhe Liu, August G. Domel, Seyed Abdolmajid Yousefsani, Jovana Kondic & David B. Camarillo

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA

    Jovana Kondic

  3. Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Gerald Grant & David B. Camarillo

  4. Department of Neurology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Gerald Grant

  5. Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Michael Zeineh

  6. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    David B. Camarillo

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  1. Yuzhe Liu
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Correspondence to Yuzhe Liu.

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Associate Editor Stefan M. Duma oversaw the review of this article.

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The original online version of this article was revised to correct the description about SWA mouthguard accuracy in the 6th sentence of the 11th paragraph (starting with “In summary, “) in the Discussion section. The original online version of this article was also revised to correct the corresponding author as Yuzhe Liu.

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Liu, Y., Domel, A.G., Yousefsani, S.A. et al. Validation and Comparison of Instrumented Mouthguards for Measuring Head Kinematics and Assessing Brain Deformation in Football Impacts. Ann Biomed Eng 48, 2580–2598 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-020-02629-3

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